Every time someone mentions Mexico or Central America you bring up "corruption". How is legally purchasing and relocating a team "corrupt"? Please explain.
Lot's of other people mistake randomized trials with controls, for observational data. Guess which one we can never do with global football so we'll never really know about causation, just be able to map a lot of associated conditions with outcomes
Considering player recruitment and salary is the #1 cost for any professional sports team I would say it is due IN LARGE part to not having certain costs. . Let's go back, what I have been saying is simple, when MLS started it had all the advantages. it struggled to get a foothold nearly going bankrupt in the early 2000's but it survived and progressed beginning to improve in the mid 2000's. Around the same time a wider soccer boom, not just the prem, began to happen. This is seen in better ratings and attendance for the national team. Better ratings and coverage for the Champions League, an increase in the summer friendlies, and YES better coverage and ratings for the Premier League. Did MLS play a role in creating it? Sure. But I think looking at ratings, attendance, just general interest I think it's difficult to say MLS created or drove this boom. If I had to identify the biggest driver I would say the 2006 W.C., and the biggest beneficiary would be the US National Team. In terms of Beckham sure his off field persona helped, but without the wider soccer context it's not very different than George Best in NASL. When we're all in a worldwide Quarantine next week I'll find it. The misleading wiki post listed the broadcasters for the Premier League which looks impressive on paper, but the reality is those broadcasters rarely gave the prem much until FSC in the mid 2000's. I did and I wasn't trying to be snarky just pointing out that the biggest driver in sports is a local connection. And guess what MLS is full of them while the prem doesn't have a single on. Sure and I am assuming/hoping their will be. But again at least for me you can't create something overnight. I hadn't given two craps about USL until Saturday night. Maybe you can but I can't just snap my fingers and pretend to care. Like I said I am giving the league and the team every opportunity by purchasing season tickets. I have traditionally cared more about MLS because it's been around longer and is recognized as the top league. Hence the reason that promotion COULD give the league more value for me. Not promising you it will, we could end up with a MLS team and for what ever reason I don't end up making a connection. Sure and I am assuming/hoping the Loyal winning will have "some" value as well. But not as much as the Chargers did or Liverpool does. And honestly I got really interested in SDSU three years ago with then Chargers left, before that I was more of a fairweather Aztec fan. I didn't go there and the Chargers were my focus, but the glass ceiling shown by the fact that unless they go undefeated the best they hope for is the Las Vegas bowl makes it tough.. Again all of this is very personal to me. But here is the thing, sports is very personal. Why people follow a team and pay money to watch people play a sport is personal and visceral, so the more things a league can offer the more ways to interest a fan the better they're going to do.
I think the 1990 and 1994 World Cups, along with the 1999 Women's World Cup, played a big part in increasing high school participation.
The trouble is, pro/rel is so commonplace in professional soccer that the correlation vs causation argument is very valid. The best leagues use it but so do the worst and the vast majority in between. The thing is, when you actually look at it statistically, teams from leagues without pro/rel have been relatively successful. MLS has won its continental cup on two occassions. New Zealand dominates the O-League, as the A-League did before Australia left. Australia have had a club win the AFC Champions League in recent memory. Meanwhile, the most successful nation in terms of club titles in AFC are South Korea, who had a closed league during their most dominant period. Then there's the fact that many historic European champs have never been relegated from their top flights. But again, correlation doesn't equal causation. It has always been my sense that pro/rel is less a cause of success in football nations and more a product of it. It is and always has been a system that was implemented to allow for a larger quantity of viable teams than a single division could accommodate.
Pro-rel happened in England when one league failed and another offered to absorb its team's. Pro/rel happened in West Germany to accommodate the 44 amateur clubs that applied to join a 16 team Bundesliga. Has any league ever introduced pro/rel to make it more competitive?
Certainly the reason pro/rel was eventually introduced between the Football League and "non league" football. A lot of dead wood had built up in the league that kept getting re-elected to the exclusion of better-run teams outside the league.
You're right that it's probably not the cause, but one of the reasons that pro/rel countries have won the World Cup for last 50+ years is due to their ability to find talent and they're able to do that because the entire nation can be blanketed with clubs trying to get to the top division and, to do so, are trying to uncover their barn find star. The U.S. has been able to get by by being a nation of immigrants and a desirable place to emigrate to. It's also big, which increases the network of potential foreign nationals. But if we added a third pillar: a market-driven, full country scouting network, who knows what kinds of teams we could produce. So, no, correlation does not equal causation, but it also doesn't mean that it doesn't contribute to it.
Whether or not it's illegal, it's unethical, and I think pretty much everyone not directly profiting from it would say it runs counter to the intended norms. However, the loophole will be exploited and not get closed (or will be enforced selectively) because everyone who will profit from it is on the take. It's the side effect of when corruption gets culturally normalized, institutions that haven't explicitly legislated every expected norm will see them taken advantage of. And in soccer, sadly, we see this in spades.
As a result of participating in this discussion for a number of years, I've paid careful attention to South Korea, given that pro/rel is in its infancy there (this time around... their prior attempts to implement it were failures). The first thing to consider is that they didn't do it to make the league more competitive. They did it because the AFC had pro/rel as a weighted criteria in determining which nations contributed clubs to which competition. They used to have 2 tiers, the lower of which was deemed "developing" soccer nations. The top tier entered clubs in the AFC Champions League, the lower in the AFC Cup. My understanding is that they've moved away from that system, towards something closer to UEFA's coefficient method. Anyway, I digress. Korea implemented it to because the AFC encouraged it. It has not actually made the league more competitive. The lack of viable top flight clubs meant that they had to reduce the number of teams in the top flight from 18 to 14 and relegate 4 clubs, just to have enough teams in the second tier that could realistically cope with promotion. To date, we've mostly seen established K-League 1 clubs yo-yo between divisions. The strongest team not to have originated in the original K-League is the police team, which basically includes pro players fulfilling national service. As this creates roster turnover from year to year, this has actually prevented them from being promoted. Attendances have actually tanked since it was brought in, though that's more external factors than league format. Initially it was thought that this was mostly down to the league going to headcounts instead of ticket distribution for attendance numbers but they've continued to decline even under the new counting method.
Because the FFM and or the league could institute rules to change this, but haven't because the association and the league is basically controlled by the wealthy owners who tend to act in their own self interest. And this is fundamentally different than traditional relocation in North American sports, which I also detest but would not call corrupt, because this is changing an outcome that is supposed to be determined on the field. This would be more like a team missing the playoffs, then buying another franchise that did and moving them so they can compete in the playoffs. And this is not meant as a MAGA inspired insult on Mexico. Friends of mine who support the Mexican National side, and follow Liga MX clubs use the term "corrupt" to describe the association and the league all the time. Personally if given the option of pro/rel where owners can buy their way back into the league, or the system we have now I'd take what we have now.
The association is the league. Liga MX has a 55% voting bloc. I don't see it as corrupt if it's within the rules. Now where the money goes is a whole different matter.
If you want to stick to the legal definition of corruption than I guess your correct, but as a society we often use the term corruption to refer to certain practices that are seen as wrong but are not actually illegal at that time or in that country. The reason why that practiced is allowed is because the federation/league is controlled by a small handful of wealthy owners who then write the rules to benefit themselves.
🚨 Protesta en el #AscensoMXFutbolistas se unen en contra de la iniciativa por erradicar el ascenso y descenso. Acuerdo entre todos los futbolistas del Ascenso a lo largo de la Jornada 8. pic.twitter.com/wWLtgOtFK0— Salvador Pérez 🍿🕊️ (@YoSoyChavaPerez) March 13, 2020
Found this interesting chart in another thread: According to it the USA in % is only 1% behind the Dutch in people playing it each week! In numbers it's just overwhelmingly more players in the usa.
However, look at the age breakdown. In the US, the popular perception of soccer until recently was that it was a "safe" sport for kids, who mostly switched to "real" sports between ages 10 and 15. That is beginning to change. However, many of my friends born in the 1980s have been surprised to learn that professional soccer exists at all. And as recently as 2003, during my senior season of college soccer, MLS was still sending out a mass letter to all seniors in college soccer that basically amounted to "We exist! Please consider entering the MLS draft?" And there were players drafted into MLS as recently as 2005 who had no idea MLS existed until their final season of college soccer, and who had never seen a professional match (not even on TV) until they were playing in one. If you look at the FIFA statistics as of 2006, you find that the US has an extremely high ratio of youth players to adult players registered: about 10 to 1, whereas in typical European countries it is around 2 to 1.
This shouldn't be all that surprising considering the large difference in population between the Netherlands and the USA. Using 2018 numbers, The Netherlands had a population of 17.2M people. In 2018 the USA had a population of 327.2M people. For comparison, the state of California had a population of 39.6M in 2018.
Not in the the US it isn't. Soccer has largely been viewed as a "foreign sport," "Not and American Sport," and been derided for decades in the US. These attitudes, while rapidly changing in younger generations, are still widely held in the older generations. Soccer/Football is very far from the most popular sport in the US. It's certainly behind American Football and Basketball. Although it's cathing upo, baseball is still quite a ways ahead in terms of popularity. Add to that the fact that the coaching in the US for soccer is still decades behind their Concacaf rivals, it's really not a surprise that the US hasn't produced a top quality team.
That report is now 6 years out of date and interest in soccer in the US is growing rapidly (see FC Cincinnati, Atlanta United and Nashville SC). Pew Research 2006: Gallup 2017:
And going to my point about age: the generational difference in soccer's popularity means that a lot of youth coaching is terrible. As recently as the 1990s, most youth coaches at U-10 and younger age levels were parents who had not only never played the game at a high level, but never seen it played at a high level. (And by "high level" I don't even necessarily mean professional level -- most had never seen soccer played at a high amateur level either.) A significant percentage were people who had literally never kicked a soccer ball before one of their kids started playing, and were learning the rules of the game on the fly; even the ones with playing experience mostly stopped playing before by their early teens, and had mostly been coached by people who had never played. Based on what I saw around me, it wasn't until somewhere around 2010 that the majority of U-10 coaches had at least high school level playing experience.